When she had completed her effect with a delicately flavoured cigarette, she encouraged Lady Harman to proceed.
This Lady Harman did in a manner do. She said her husband left her no freedom of mind or movement, gave her no possession of herself, wanted to control her reading and thinking. “He insists——” she said.
“Yes,” said Miss Agatha sternly blowing aside her cigarette smoke. “They all insist.”
“He insists,” said Lady Harman, “on seeing all my letters, choosing all my friends. I have no control over my house or my servants, no money except what he gives me.”
“In fact you are property.”
“I’m simply property.”
“A harem of one. And all that is within the provisions of the law!”
“How any woman can marry!” said Miss Agatha, after a little interval. “I sometimes think that is where the true strike of the sex ought to begin. If none of us married! If we said all of us, ‘No,—definitely—we refuse this bargain! It is a man-made contract. We have had no voice in it. We decline.’ Perhaps it will come to that. And I knew that you, you with that quiet beautiful penetration in your eyes would come to see it like that. The first task, after the vote is won, will be the revision of that contract. The very first task of our Women Statesmen....”
She ceased and revived her smouldering cigarette and mused blinking through the smoke. She seemed for a time almost lost to the presence of her guest in a great daydream of womanstatecraft.
“And so,” she said, “you’ve come, as they all come,—to join us.”